The manuscripts of the novels of Anthony Powell,
including the Dance to the Music of Time series are to
go to the British Library. The author had wanted them
to go to his old school, Eton College, but because of
death tax duties on his £1.6m estate, a deal was done
in a deal whereby the Inland Revenue agreed to forego
duties of £420,000.

The collection will shortly be open to the public and
some of it will be lent to the Wallace Collection who
next year will be staging an exhibition to mark the
100th anniversary of the author’s birth. The decision
to place the manuscripts in the British Museum’s
custody, rather than let them remain at Eton, where
they originally went to after the author’s death, was
taken by the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell.

Happens to the best of us

Louis de Bernières, the author of Captain Corelli's
Mandolin, has had a computer containing the first four
chapters of his third novel stolen from his garden shed
in his home in Harleston, Norfolk. How many times do we
have to say it - 'back up your hard disk,
Louis!'.

There are occasional complaints in the press from small
retail businesses about charity shops. These complaints
range across many types of merchandise but bookselling
has come under closer focus because of the burgeoning
number of specialist charity book shops. In the light
of this debate Ibooknet booksellers would like to make
their position clear.

Situation: you have books you no longer require.
What should you do?Answer: it depends on the book and on whether
you wish to benefit financially from the sale yourself
or whether you wish to benefit a charity.

If you have a Penguin Classic of Wuthering Heights for
example, or a GCSE revision book then the charity shop
plays an important role here for students and other
readers to exchange high volume titles that are needed
for study and needed cheaply. The charity shop will
sell your book quickly, especially in a university
town, and will benefit from the sale and quick
turnover. Many charity shops are reporting difficulty
in keeping enough of these classics in stock and really
do benefit from you having a clear out. If you buy a
book then take it back when you’ve finished so charity
shop and next year’s students can benefit all over
again. For books and all kinds of goods, charity shops
are excellent recyclers and are an import aspect of the
environmental economy in any town.

For other books it pays to see a specialist
Bookseller

If you're looking to dispose of a book collection and
feel some of them might be of value consider talking to
a professional bookseller (check your local business
directory or websites, such as Ibooknet, listing lots
of booksellers, to find the right one) before donating
to a charity shop. You might just find you get more
money to give directly to the charity of your choice.
Most professional booksellers pay between 30 and 50% of
their retail price for saleable items, sometimes even
more if there are some valuable items in a collection.

A charity shop, on the other hand, will only realise
such a sum from the sale if the charity shop in
question recognises the value of the donated items
which, as most employees have only had a few weeks
training, is unlikely. Often such valuations are not
straight forward: questions such as whether a book is a
true first printing (i.e. a collector’s ‘first
edition’) and how much a missing dust wrapper, or
damage, or ex-library status can affect value in wildly
differing degrees depending on exactly what the book is
and the purpose for which it is being sold.

The problems of non-professionals deciding whether a
book is worth keeping is well illustrated by this
incident which happened to Stephen Foster who
specializes in antiquarian books. At the last minute a
valuable book was saved because of Stephen’s knowledge.

He recalls: ‘I did pay a charity shop a three-figure
sum for a book on horses hooves. It had been thrown in
the recycled paper bin, because it had 'no covers'. A
volunteer retrieved it from the bin, because they
thought that I should have a look at it. For 'no
covers', read 'original wraps'. 1790's large 4to with
aquatint plates - it was a taller copy than the one in
the Mellon collection, probably one of the best
collections of horse books in the world, making it not
only rare, but probably the best available copy!’ Not
only was the book saved but the charity benefited from
a large sum from Stephen which, left to the volunteer
who threw the book out, they would never have received.

Chris Tomaszewski, of Stella & Rose's Books, one of
the largest children’s bookshops in the UK, comments,
‘This experience demonstrates that it would have been
better for the donor to have taken the book to a
specialist such as Stephen in the first instance. They
would have received a proper price which could then
have been given directly to the charity, rather than
risk their donation ending up in the recycling bin!’

So exactly what do you get if you take a book to a
professional Bookseller?

Professional booksellers will tend to have a particular
area of expertise and quite a close subject focus. You
can find professional sellers who specialise in
antiquarian volumes who can value your books for
insurance, help you decide whether a book is worth
rebinding, or help you find replacements for missing or
damaged volumes. You can find sellers specialising in
academic books who have post-graduate experience in
your subject and can give well informed bibliographical
advice. You can find sellers with an expertise in a
subject such as children’s books, or crime fiction
whose knowledge is such they can help identify a title
just from a character’s name or a partly remembered
plot, and can advise on building or disposing of a
collection. Most importantly a professional bookseller
knows they don’t have all the answers and will have a
collection of reference books and connections with a
wide range of colleagues and other experts to back them
up. Most professionals will tell you if a title or a
question is out of their area and be able to recommend
someone else in the trade who can help you instead.

So consult a specialist bookseller and get the best
advice and the best price for old, rare, collectable or
unusual books. If you want to, you can then donate the
profit to a charity of your choice, or spend it in a
charity shop. Take your other books to the charity
shops and support them by buying there too. Ibooknet
booksellers donate books to charity shops too. You can
support both your local professional and the amateur
charity shop, and you should support them both if you
don’t want your town to lose either.

Ladbroke's odds on Man
Booker
longlist nominees

Nominee:

Open at:

06/09/04

Nadeem Aslan - Maps of Lost Lovers

20/1

10/1

Nicola Barker - Clear: A Transparent Novel

10/1

14/1

John Bemrose - The Island Walkers

20/1

20/1

-

Ronan Bennett - Havoc, in its Third Year

20/1

16/1

Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange & Mr
Norrell

16/1

8/1

Neil Cross - Always the Sun

16/1

20/1

Achmat Dangor - Bitter Fruit

16/1

20/1

Louise Dean - Becoming Strangers

8/1

10/1

Lewis Desoto - A Blade of Grass

16/1

20/1

Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

16/1

25/1

James Hamilton-Paterson - Cooking with Fernet
Branca

12/1

20/1

Justin Haythe - The Honeymoon

16/1

20/1

Shirley Hazzard - The Great Fire

16/1

16/1

-

Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

4/1

4/1

-

Gail Jones - Sixty Lights

12/1

25/1

David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

8/1

3/1

Chimamanda Ngozi - Purple Hibiscus

10/1

20/1

Sam North - The Unnumbered

20/1

25/1

Nicolas Shakespeare - Snowleg

20/1

16/1

Matt Thorne - Cherry Weidenfeld

20/1

25/1

Colm Toibin - The Masters

8/1

10/1

Gerrard Woodward - I'll go to Bed at Noon

12/1

16/1

Harry Potter books don't impress women

According to a recent survey by the publishers, Penguin, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are a big turn-off for women. Now would this “finding” have reached the public ear if Penguin had the publishing rights for these books?

Blue Plaque for Ezra Pound house

Nazi-supporting, anti-semite American Poet, Ezra Pound, has finally got a blue plaque to commemmorate his residence in Kensington Church Walk, London where he lived from 1909 to 1914. The poet’s personal views have finally been subordinated to his artistic merit and Pound’s immense influence on literary modernism, especiallly TS Eliot’s Waste Land, have at last been given public recognition by English Heritage, who sponsor the plagues. From his Kensington home, Pound promoted the then-unknown Eliot and James Joyce and worked with WB Yeats.

Dylan Thomas Prize for literature

The Dylan Thomas Poetry prize, sponsored by the poet’s home city of Swansea, will be launched on 27th October this year, the birthday of the poet. The prize money of £65,000 is one of the richest literary awards in the world and is open to all under-30 year old writers of novels, poetry, plays and even travel books.